Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (12 page)

There is an old wood-cased pendulum clock on the wall in the corner. It has stopped.

She passes a plate of cookies, pours coffee.

“There is now a collective hysteria,” she continues. “I am a woman who is never afraid and now I’m afraid. I change my route to work. Two of the police were killed a few blocks from my home. Before, the violence focused on poor women. Now, it can happen to anyone. The gangs fight to control the drug business. Before, it was gangs killing gangs. Now, police chiefs are killed. For fourteen years, the business community here has blamed me for putting a blot on the image of Juárez. Now with this terrible violence, no one is talking about anyone slandering Juárez.”

We talk for almost three hours. She says the violence is because of discrimination against women, it is because of the poverty, because of ignorance, because of the culture, because women have so little self-esteem here, because of a lack of faith in the authorities, because of social isolation since so many women come to the city for work without any family around them, because the maquiladoras are about making money, not about the well-being of people.

She calls a cab and then we go outside.

Across the street, a massive new home is going up, and it is topped with a huge dome done up in golden tiles. Two-story windows sketch the face, and big columns frame the portico.

I glance at her and say, “Narco.”

She smiles, and then points to the other homes on the cul-de-sac and says, “Narco, narco, narco, narco, narco, five of my neighbors are narcos.”

But she contests my statement about the new house going up across the street.

“No,” she explains, “ he says he is a professor. A very strange professor.”

Two years ago, I was at another house a block or so from the home of Esther Chávez. It also was a fine residence. It was a place men in the city came to party and celebrate after performing executions. There would be food and drink, cocaine and women. In that case, they had maintained a death house a few miles away, one in which they committed twelve murders and then buried the bodies in the patio. The state police were paid to be executioners.

I mention this to Esther and she nods without expression.

She says, “I am going to put all the bad stories in my book.”

But she is pressed for time, what with the cancer, the chemotherapy, the work at Casa Amiga. She is seventy-two, she notes, and is running out of time.

But her book will be the real history of the city because the real history of the city is violence against the people of the city and the most powerless people in the city are the women. The real history of the city is written on the bodies of women, and this is not a history men are likely to sanction, even as they record it in the day and the night on bleeding flesh.

Sometimes the bodies have tattoos that say Juárez. Or sometimes there is a marijuana leaf etched into the brown skin and the message: I Always Consume.

The army’s work in Juárez is barely reported because writing or saying what the military is up to could result in serious injury or death. So, at best, the newspapers will report some execution and say that the neighbors described the killers as dressed like commandos. The exact meaning lurking in the word
commando
is never spelled out. On other parts of the border, where the army has descended in order to reinstall peace and tranquility, locals mention a sudden bloom of robberies by men wearing military-type clothing and masks. But this also is never elaborated upon. When, in a few instances, there have been demonstrations protesting the violence and heavy-handedness of the army, this has been dismissed by both the generals and the federal government because they insist these demonstrations are really shams sponsored by various drug cartels.

The army has been operating in the Mexican state of Michoacan for at least a year before it arrives in force in Juárez. Norberto Ramírez says that in his village in Michoacan, the soldiers seized him, put a plastic bag over his head, cinched it tight, and spent all night taking turns suffocating him to the edge of death. They also beat him with rifle butts and shocked him with electric cattle prods. Of course, he did better than the seventeen-year-old boy shot dead. Ramírez, though lucky, can no longer work, because his frolic that night with the military damaged his liver and intestines beyond surgical repair. Also, he had a green card for working in the United States, but the soldiers took this away with his health. So far, over 421 human rights complaints have been lodged against the army since it began its war on drugs in December 2006. No soldier has been charged with any offense. Including the ones who gunned down two women and three children at a highway checkpoint in Sinaloa.

The U.S. State Department has issued a travel alert for Americans visiting Mexico, especially Juárez. The federal diplomats advise that if an American feels he or she is being followed, then the prudent thing to do is immediately contact Mexican authorities. Also, it is advised that American visitors stay out of areas where prostitution and drug dealing take place.

The alert states: “Violent criminal activity fueled by a war between criminal organizations struggling for control of the lucrative narcotics trade continues along the U.S.-Mexico border. Attacks are aimed primarily at members of drug trafficking organizations, Mexican police forces, criminal justice officials, and journalists. However, foreign visitors and residents, including Americans, have been among the victims of homicides and kidnappings in the border region.”

Miss Sinaloa

I am looking in at her cell
in the asylum. A small mattress fills it, and at the foot of the mattress is a yellow five-gallon bucket for defecation and urination. The walls are white tile because patients such as Miss Sinaloa tend to smear their feces on surfaces. The door is solid metal with a tiny slot because the Miss Sinaloas of the world tend to throw their feces at the staff. Plaid blankets cover the mattress.

This was her home for at least two months. No one could reach her. She raved, she was very angry. In part, she was locked up to protect her from the other patients who craved her fair skin and beauty. And in part, she was locked up because she would go berserk without warning.

And she was bald. The staff had to cut off her long, beautiful hair because it is an occupational risk here. Other patients have a tendency to take long hair and strangle the person with it.

At first, Miss Sinaloa is very violent. She cries constantly and throws things. So the staff gives her pills and she sleeps for two or three days. Then she awakens and is more calm. She tells everyone in the crazy place that she won a contest, she is a beauty queen and also a model. She says that she has known oh so many men who wanted to fuck her, but she had known no one like Ramon, who truly loves her for herself.

Her beauty becomes a problem. When she is let out of her cell into the yard in the crazy place, she stands out in her glory. El Pastor says, “She was like the last Coca Cola in the desert and so proud and the other ladies were jealous.”

She would spend all day doing her makeup, doing it over and over and over. She was very clean. Each morning, she made the bed in her tiny cell and washed all the walls, scrubbing endlessly.

Ramon is a twenty-five-year-old drunk who has wandered into the crazy place and earns his keep serving meals. He is a homely man—El Pastor thinks he may be the ugliest man in the world. He takes plates of beans to Miss Sinaloa in her cell. She falls in love with him and he falls in love with her. Ramon has never had a girlfriend before—he is dazzled by even this ghost of the Miss Sinaloa who arrived in Juárez to party at the Casablanca.

She says, “How wonderful that this happened to me. Because of it I was able to find you, the most beautiful creature ever created by God.”

El Pastor overhears Miss Sinaloa whispering her love to Ramon and is alarmed. Then he notices love marks on Ramon’s neck and dismisses him.

Miss Sinaloa regresses and soon returns to her deep madness. She denounces El Pastor for ruining the great love of her life.

El Pastor stares with me into the cell—maybe nine feet by five feet.

Originally, he came out here and lived in a hut with his wife. He had two donkeys for gathering wood. He started stacking up blocks and bricks. This went on for three years. The police would bring the rejects of our world—whores burned out by lust and drugs, illegal immigrants kicked back by the United States because it did not want to tend to their damaged minds, topless dancers who had lost that half-step, street people who had sniffed so much glue and paint that they were now residents of oblivion, all the damned of our world.

El Pastor now houses and feeds one hundred. He walks me around and shows his expansion dream that will give him the capacity for two hundred fifty souls. He will have the patients making bricks—those who can still function well enough to mix up mud. He will sell these blocks and so give people a kind of dignity and himself some cash flow for the medicines they require in order to bottle up their rages.

A small, retarded man stands next to me clutching a children’s book. It is in English, but then, he can’t read any language. On October 11, he murdered another patient.

“You can’t do anything to be safe here,” El Pastor explains as we stand in the yard with eighty of the maimed milling about us.

“Heroin in the city,” he explains, “is twenty-five pesos.”

This means less than $2.50 a hit.

“Cocaine,” El Pastor continues, “is everywhere here and cheaper than marijuana. And now they smoke cocaine with marijuana. We’re talking about people eighteen to twenty-five now, the people who get executed. They are ghosts, human trash walking naked in the city.”

In Nuevo Laredo, the sister city to Laredo, Texas, people notice a huge banner floating over one of the major thoroughfares. The message is simple: “Operative group ‘The Zetas’ wants you, soldier or ex-soldier. We offer a good salary, food and benefits for your family. Don’t suffer any more mistreatment and don’t go hungry.” The banner also advises, “We don’t feed you Maruchan soups [a brand of ramen noodles].” It lists a cell phone number. In Tampico, another banner appears that says, “Join the ranks of the Gulf Cartel. We offer benefits, life insurance, a house for your family and children. Stop living in the slums and riding the bus. A new car or truck, your choice. What more could you ask for? Tamaulipas, Mexico, the USA and the entire world is Gulf Cartel territory.” The authorities in Mexico City say they think the advertisement is authentic.

The Zetas, besides maintaining training camps for new employees, also equip their people with automatic weapons, grenades, dynamite, and rocket launchers. Presumably they also get machetes since the group sometimes decapitates its adversaries. One of the Zetas’ leaders is said to have elite Guatemalan soldiers as bodyguards. On March 17, Mexican authorities in the state of Tamaulipas seize a Jeep Cherokee with special features: a smoke-screen generator, bulletproofing, and, attached in the rear, a device to throw spikes on the road.

The Mexicans slaughtered in this killing season get to die twice. First, at the hands of their murderers, and then later, they are killed again by the explanations of their deaths. They are said to die from a cartel war, or from a war between the president of Mexico and the cartels, or a war between the Mexican army and the cartels or possibly as a result of drug consumers in the United States financing evil people with their habits and thus creating the slaughter every time they roll a joint.

These explanations are efforts to streamline a messy torrent of events. But what is happening in Juárez and increasingly throughout Mexico is the breakdown of a system. There are no jobs, the young face blank futures, the poor are crushed by sinking fortunes. The state has always violated human rights, and now, in the general mayhem, this fact becomes more and more obvious.

Killing is not deviance, it is a logical career decision for thousands floundering in a failing economy and a failing state.